In today's era of rising environmental awareness, products powered by solar energy are gaining more and more attention. Ricardo Sappia’s recently launched DIY solar-powered weather station is a good example of this trend. This weather station uses an E-Ink display, which features low energy consumption and high contrast, making it an ideal choice for devices with low power consumption and infrequent updates.
One of the great advantages of E Ink displays is that they consume almost no power when displaying still images. For Sappia's solar-powered weather station, this means it can be efficiently powered by solar energy. Designed to be placed next to a window, the weather station is equipped with a small solar panel on the back that receives enough sunlight during the day to charge a small lithium polymer battery for use at night. The ESP32 development board pulls weather information from the Internet and displays it on the E Ink screen, and enters an energy-saving deep sleep mode during the update interval.
The special E Ink display used in this weather station is Wemos's 2.13-inch three-color model with a resolution of 250×122. It can display white, black and red pixels. Sappia's carefully designed user interface displays the time, date, moon status, sunrise time, sunset time, the highest and lowest temperatures throughout the day, wind speed and direction, and cloud conditions. Most of the information is shown in black and white, but red is used in some parts, such as the one representing the sun.
Weather station structure diagram. (Source: hackster.io)
Regarding the software that runs the weather station, Sappia is not the original author. The original source code of the software running on this project was written by David Bird. The code can be found in his GitHub repository , and Sappia also modified the code moderately for this project and released it on GitHub .
Sappia cleverly houses all these components within a 3D-printed casing that can be placed on the window frame. Overall, this solar weather station not only provides comprehensive weather information, but is also an innovative product that is environmentally friendly and energy-saving, perfectly embodying the harmonious symbiosis of technology and nature.
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